View full sizeTorsten Kjellstrand/The OregonianWhen Connie Gunn-McConnell's son Richard got out of control, she knew she had to call police for help, in part because she was worried about the safety of her granddaughter Nyla Bea, 3, who lives in the same home. But Gunn-McConnell worried that police might shoot her son. "All I could think was, 'Don't shoot my son! Don't shoot my son!'" And they didn't. Now, Gunn-McConnell praises police for their restraint.

Connie Gunn-McConnell's teenage son began punching himself and beating his head against the stairs. Then he grabbed a knife and put it to his throat.

Gunn-McConnell knew he needed help that Jan. 7 evening. But she feared calling Portland police.

Portland police had two highly publicized encounters the previous weeks with mentally ill men armed with knives, and neither ended well. Gunn-McConnell also couldn't forget last year's fatal police shooting of Aaron Campbell less than four blocks away. And Campbell wasn't armed.

"Due to the previous mishaps, I was just really scared to call them, but felt I had no choice," said Gunn-McConnell, who lives on Northeast Sandy Boulevard.

Portland police don't want people afraid to call them and are struggling to find ways to improve their encounters with people in a mental health crisis. Critics say Portland police have abandoned their once-lauded system for responding to such calls, leaving the community unsure of what kind of response to expect.

During a second 9-1-1 call, Gunn-McConnell's husband made his own plea. "He is upset, and I don't want him to be shot, because this is more of an attempted thing."

Gunn-McConnell heard police car sirens, watched officers gear up with rifles and call a dog to track her son.

"So I really started panicking," she said. "I thought, 'Oh my God, I'm going to be one of those mothers.' It kept going through my head. I felt my son was going to die that day."

Her son ran to another apartment. A woman from that unit came out to let Gunn-McConnell know her son was inside and had no knife.

Gunn-McConnell's husband, Michael McConnell, called into the apartment, urging his son's friend to tell him to come out with his hands up. "We did that on our own," Gunn-McConnell said.

Their son soon did and followed police directions. Gunn-McConnell is grateful, and she praised the police response.

"They kept me informed. They didn't push me away," she said. "They kept me with them. They were really nice, caring, they understood. It was just awesome. I didn't get pushed back. They handled him with kid gloves."

The couple's son was briefly hospitalized, and they are trying to get him into counseling.

"Something's not working"

The officers who responded that night, Eric Dinnel and David Kemple, treated the Gunn-McConnells the way families in Portland pray they will be treated if they need to call police. But the string of recent shootings has had a chilling effect on the community, making some reluctant to call the very public servants paid to help them.

"A lot of us have talked about being afraid to call. We are because we don't know what we'll get. It could be helpful, but it could be tragic," said Terri Walker, board president of the local chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness. "To see this many events in such a short period of time, something's not working."

Police Chief Mike Reese estimates that out of 440,000 contacts his officers make each year, 28,000 involve people in a mental health crisis.

"It's overwhelming us," Reese said.

Of the recent officer-involved shootings, the chief said, "Certainly in the last two months, we've had too many. It takes a terrible toll on the community. It takes a terrible toll on us."

The national trend for decades has been to treat mentally ill in their communities instead of institutions, but in many cases that care is not available or is not affordable. It is almost impossible to involuntarily institutionalize someone who has not committed a crime.

Portland police are not alone in feeling frustrated. The International Association of Chiefs of Police hosted a forum two years ago on improving the police response to people with mental illness. The recommendations emphasized two things: Police agencies must have an effective crisis intervention program that helps officers de-escalate confrontations; and police need to maintain a strong, personal collaboration with mental health professionals, consumers, their families and advocates.

Memphis' CIT model, one that Portland police built their crisis intervention training program after in 1994, has been hailed as a success.

The Tennessee program is voluntary, with a specialized group of officers selected for training in crisis intervention and then scattered throughout the police precincts on all three shifts, ready to be called to an emergency involving someone suffering from mental illness.

Yet Portland's program veered from the model. Police and mental health advocates who built Portland's first Crisis Intervention Team and mental health consumers are now questioning the effectiveness of today's incarnation.

"This program only works if it's a team and the community is engaged," said Cathy Hory, who was a supervisor with Metro's crisis line and a county behavioral health employee when she worked with Portland police to start its first Crisis Intervention Team.

After the 1992 Portland police shooting of Nathan Thomas, a 12-year-old held hostage by a mentally ill man with a knife, Portland police traveled with mental health experts to Memphis and helped craft a similar program here. It began with 60 officers who volunteered for the 40-hour training and, within 18 months, grew to 185 officers.

"It became something that everybody owned and wanted to work, and we had success with it," Hory said. "We gave each officer a CIT pin, and when someone saw that pin, they knew that officer had a special skill. These officers understood the symptoms. People trusted them. You can't just do a shotgun approach to this training."

Retired Memphis police Maj. Sam Cochran, who pioneered the program there, agreed. "I don't think this is a police training issue. I think it's a broader issue," Cochran said. "I think you need strong leadership, and you need to have officers who really buy into the program."

A new approach for Portland

In Portland, the bureau switched from a voluntary training program for a select group of officers, led by an officer or sergeant, to training all officers in 2007. The switch came after the controversial 2006 death in police custody of James P. Chasse Jr., who suffered from paranoid schizophrenia. He was tackled by police and died from blunt force trauma to the chest.

In response, Mayor Tom Potter convened a mental health task force and directed the bureau to train all officers in crisis intervention on the theory that they would be better equipped to deal with chance encounters with mentally ill subjects instead of waiting for the specially trained CIT officers.

"The community wanted that," said Liesbeth Gerritsen, the bureau's mental health expert who is the current coordinator of crisis intervention training.

She and Reese defend the bureau's current approach. Reese calls it "innovative and creative." He describes Portland's approach as a "layered" one, with the mandatory crisis intervention training laying a foundation "because all of our officers need it." That's coupled with a one-car mobile crisis unit, now limited to four days a week in Central Precinct, that pairs an officer with a mental health worker to identify people who come into frequent contact with police and intervene before a crisis. He cited the bureau's hostage negotiation team as the third piece, a specialty team to help out on calls involving armed or suicidal people.

Yet the hostage-negotiation team was not called out before any of the recent officer-involved shootings.

Retired Sgt. Karl McDade, who was Portland's first Crisis Intervention Team coordinator, suggests the bureau go back to a CIT specialized team, put a high-ranking officer in charge and make sure emergency dispatchers are trained to obtain sufficient information to send the appropriate officers.

"I don't have any problem with every officer being trained," McDade said, "but not every officer will find it's his cup of tea to deal with these kinds of calls."

Judgment and maturity

In Memphis, about 225 officers out of the approximately 1,400-member force are trained as crisis intervention team officers. They're considered specialists, just like members of tactical squads or hostage negotiators.

"We're looking for judgment and maturity," Cochran said. "That's not a criticism of other officers. All of our officers can be trained, but I don't think all officers have the judgment and maturity level that's needed, and volunteer to do it. I think that makes a difference."

The typical training for police is to establish strong command and control. Cochran said that may not work on calls with people who suffer from a mental illness and may be fearful of police and not react as officers expect.

In fact, as a counterbalance to the general police rule that a person with a knife within 21 feet can stab you more quickly than you can draw your gun and fire, Memphis police also teach officers that a person holding a knife "does not necessarily mean a person is intending to harm you."

Cochran said the training does not diminish the officers' judgment as to when to use deadly force, but it includes training in the complexities of people suffering from paranoia and delusions. In those circumstances, he said, the subject may perceive that he is protecting himself from the officer.

Gerritsen, crisis intervention coordinator and mental health expert for Portland police, cautioned against comparing Portland to Memphis. She said Portland lacks a key component of the program: a psychiatric evaluation facility where officers can take people who are in emotional crisis.

She argues that it is better to have all officers trained in crisis intervention, because all officers at some point encounter someone in emotional crisis.

Gerritsen said she hasn't reviewed the recent officer-involved shootings and police tactics. "I don't have a law enforcement background. That's not my place to do that," she said. "Regardless, I'm always looking at our training. I'm looking to always improve it."

McDade argues that the bureau's Crisis Intervention Team coordinator should be a high-ranking officer who can assess police tactics.

"It's disheartening for families of the mentally ill," McDade said. "And to see police officers getting into these situations ... police don't want to harm people. They want to help people. When they're ill-prepared to deal with these things, it's a tragedy all the way around."